Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: street life

  • May Day, May Day

    Two people made fuck, out on the concreted area in front of the apartments. I recognised the act by her cries. He had her sprawled over a car bonnet with his hand around her throat, and for a few minutes I watched clenching my fists. Were those cries of despair? Is she ok? Do I need to rescue this woman from rape?

    But then she got up and staggered before him for a minute and lifted away her skirts on either side like a ladybird’s tissuey inner wings. The pale curves of her bottom and thighs were perfect with youth, like two slices of soft long pears from a can. She presented to him her hindquarters and bent herself forward with yearning. He drew her back into his lap and then, skewered, she twisted herself round to kiss. Now and again someone walked past them and they simply froze in place, his place just now being immemorial. A couple of girls strolled by with their cell phones lighted and I feared a filming, an aggression, a posting which would attempt to shame, but the girl walking just ahead lifted her phone and continued a conversation without, apparently, noticing the two there who were holding down the fort. He lifted her jumper to cup her breast. It is cold. They rearranged themselves again and she spread herself on her back on the shiny car, her legs like searchlights. Next morning I went down to buy bread, because we are Germans now, and passed the chalked square for a parked car where they had set each other alight. The big sprawling dark car was gone and in its place a tiny blue and silver rechargeable, as though the yelping congress in the night had already borne its fruit.

  • don’t stand so far from me

    Och, my heart’s pounding! I just queued in the supermarket next to a man taller than me (rare) with whom I conceived one of those fleeting yet it stains your day – your weekend! – mutual desire curves founded in, apparently, mutual liking as well as pheromonal drift. Oh, I stood next to him and he stood next to me. He came up behind me and I cleared my stuff out of the way, as Berliners often do for one another, so that he could lay his heavy armfuls of groceries on the band. “Danke schön,” he said, in just this irresistible voice, and I glanced up and met the most beautiful eyes and a shock went through me and my face lit up and I said, “Bitte!” A pleasure!

    After that we both crowded up close to one another and he was humming and after a little while started singing so that I would see what a gorgeous voice he had. I was immersed in the glowing feeling running up and down my nearer, left side and in parsing his collection of groceries (single!) and in searching round the vault of my brain for some plausible, yet open-ended, conversational gambit. The woman ahead of me had already greeted the cashier and her goods were being rung up. We hadn’t long.

    I picked up the plastic divider between his stuff and mine, only later realising what a perfect psychological expression of my wishes this really was. “Ich habe gehört,” I remarked, holding it out to offer to him, “daß diese manchmal ,Kassentoblerone’ gennant werden.” Ya know, I’ve heard these are sometimes called Cashier Toblerones.

    “Stimmt!” he said, yeah that’s right! He took the thing from me and lifted it up. Pretended to stuff the end in his mouth and tear off a hearty chunk. We laughed and then there was nothing else to do but grow shy, so we both turned back to the belt and gazed at the groceries. He checked out my stuff and I checked out his. I was buying the ingredients for a carrot and ginger soup and he likes decent cheeses. My side was humming. Oh, I was just so happy and contented to be standing just that little bit too close to him, and to be in each other’s aura. There was nothing more to say, apart from, “When will you be here next, you’re so goddamned cute,” so when my goods were rung up I sang out, “Tschüss!” and he said, “Tschüss!” and I ran laughing out of the supermarket, saying to the giant punk out front who holds out his little army cap for donations of spare change, “Du siehst ja so total schön aus, heute!” You’re looking so beautiful today! It wasn’t just the punk in his Saturday outfit of fishnet stockings and a zebra print mini, it was the light, the few trees left in the corner of the car park, the little boy zooming on his scooter with a great determination, the dad who stood and watched with his arms grimly folded – I ran home and said to my companion, who was sitting up in bed holding his stomach and had requested, when I said what might make you feel better, carrot soup, “I just met this man in the supermarket and we liked each other so much! Oh, it was such a joy just standing next to each other.”

    Ordinarily these kinds of stories are just part of the ongoing conversation between us but today, stricken with stomach flu and hungry for his first solid meal in three days, the poor guy went, “Don’t, I’m gunna vomit!” He was clutching his stomach. I has pushed open the window and was peering out in case the cute guy and his cheeses might have decided to walk home down our end of the street, in case I might see him. Bye, love.

  • pity flamingo

    Every week I cross town on the train and we pass a tower block of identical grey-frame units which have grey balconies. One balcony, at eye level with the train, has a bright pink inflatable flamingo hanging like a lurid fern, I guess somebody went to Florida or Havana and brought it back with them to bring back the tropics. It doesn’t look tropical. It looks more defeated. The air has shrivelled out of it, or perhaps shrunk in the bitter chill of Berlin’s below-zero winter. The bird sags, motionless, its head drooping over its breast and hanging down to the shrivelling feet.

    Poor tropical bird, alone trapped in glassy Berlin and its colourless end of year season, after all the other bright birds have vanished down to the southern shores to caw and preen.

    Snow lies on the ground in greying patches. Hardened scars of black ice have been strewn with sharp pocks of gravel from the big grey plastic bins. This fake bird is the only pink thing. Apparently flamingoes, naturally flamboyant or perhaps insecure on their wavering stalk legs, will not make babies unless a crowd of other bright pink flamingoes stands round them watching.

    Zoos have had to set up elaborate peacock tails of mirror to encourage them to breed. Gazing out at this sad blow-up bird sometimes I think about staging an intervention. What if every passenger put on a pair of Edna Everage sunglasses. What if we all stared out the windows and flapped our arms. Maybe the dying flamingo would stir on its still leaf of string. Maybe the neck would waggle and stretch, and the tiny head come up again to display proudly its improbable and superciliously curled coconut ice pink swan lip.

    But Berlin’s trains are courteous and pragmatic. People stand back tiredly to let each other on. This week I’ve passed a junkie shooting up right into the arm, against a pillar at my nearest U-Bahn station; five people in a row who were all reading books but seemed unaware of each other; and a sturdy Polish tourist who rolled, under my nose, a plump head of ganja into his palm so that when we all got off the train, he could light it.

  • autumbled

    Autumn in Berlin and the grimy guy begging outside our supermarket is absorbed in a book. When I come home he’s set it down to thank a woman who dropped some coins into his smashed paper cup. It is Sylvia Plath.

    I prefer him to the punker dude who spreads himself with a large dog either side right in front of the sliding doors, then leans far across the pavement to make elaborate drawings in chalk which people then have to step around. His begging seems to me a form of veiled aggression. It is a set-up that forces compliance on every passerby, lest we tread on his art.

    The two months I was away I compared the daily forecasts and found Brisbane, in its winter, was invariably a degree or two warmer than here. Summer has been short and late. Just last week on the canalside two boys in the late sun were playing chess. These are the last days, and it will be so cold til June next year we will see nothing of each other but our faces.

  • cigarette break

    A lot of noise round the house today as the Hausmeister – Deutschland brims with masters – has called a gang of workmen in to saw back the thorny bushes round the huddle of bins. Our bin system is complex because everything gets recycled – everything but, puzzlingly, aluminium and steel. The thorny bushes make it hard to access the bike racks without scoring one’s skin and I welcomed the intrusion, but after a couple of hours of swearing and sawing I took refuge in a cafe I love, to try to do a bit of writing.

    I miss Brisbane but I’m not missing having to google “cafes open past 2pm” when I want to work later. This place is groaning with shelves of books and they let me sit on a sagging couch with a single coffee in front of me for nearly three hours. I came out into the lissom afternoon and joined the slow streams of people heading down to the underground station. A man was playing the flute, with his eyes closed. He was entranced.

    The first flush of leaves has hit the ground and to me it feels too soon. I’m not ready! I rode home via train and bus and train because the middle section of the line was being repaired and in Berlin everybody files in orderly fashion from the ‘replacement vehicle’ back onto the interrupted line and sits down. When I had left, two tree surgeons were standing at the street entrance of my house in boiler suits, smoking by the big glass doors. When I came back hours later they were still there. As I came up to them, I had started to laugh. “Sie waren beide hier,” I explained, “als ich rausgegangen bin. Und es scheint meinetwegen zu sein, als ob es eigentlich eine sehr sehr lange Zigarettenpause war.” You were both here when I went out. From my point of view it is tempting to assume this was a very very long cigarette break. They looked uncertain. Were they being criticised, by a stranger? Then one man smiled. “So viele Zigaretten können wir gar nicht rauchen,” he said. We can’t smoke that many. “Wir schaffen es gar nicht.” We just wouldn’t manage it.

  • illicit flower factory

    Today my boyfriend discovered the illicit dried flower factory I have been running in his apartment. At first glance it looks as though a two-dimensional squirrel has made herself a nest out of private papers and unwanted official letters retrieved from the waste paper bin beside his desk.

    “What’s this?” he said, lifting away the heavy row of comic books along the shelf to reveal my little stack of flattened envelopes and folded paper.

    “Uhm,” I said, “that’s my dried flower factory. I have one at home, as well.”

    The whole city has burst into bloom and the streets are filled with love. On our way down to the post office a man in the street grabs me, both hands clasping my forearm in a grip surprisingly determined and strong. An African man, bearded, handsome, long muscular arms and that’s all I see of him. He is smiling, pleading, manly, he is wooing me in his own language. “Danke,” I keep saying, “Danke, nein, ich muss ~ ” and wrenching my arm away I turn back to the taller man I have come out with, my beloved, who is bristling and who wraps his hand possessively about me at the waist. “What was that?” he asks, “you don’t know that guy?” “No,” I say, “he just really liked me.” “You look confident today. But why would he grab you while you’re kissing me?” he growled, looking over his shoulder in a feint.

    “Well, that’s why,” I say, having understood the man in an instant. Perfect attraction is like that, if it so often only lasts a moment. “He liked it, I think, that I was laughing and teasing and reaching for you. I think maybe he thought, I’d like a woman to look at me that way and to kiss me like she loved me. I’d like that woman.”

    He isn’t really worried, because he knows I love him. Other men casting glances and women looking at him are not new. And I know that he loves me too, he treats me beautifully and his dark sweetness and deep limpid loving heart are my water and my salt in the desert of city sugar and fat. And I know that he understands me, better than the guy who grabbed me in the street and would not let go, his eyes imploring and his smile broad, might ever do.

  • camera ambulance

    Is it Germans who are so trusting, or just Berliners? A woman cycled up with her grandchild, I think grandchild, in a netted baby trailer and parked her bike under the tree where we were standing. We were waiting for the guy who repairs cameras, as I had dropped mine onto the cobblestones an hour before. His window was dusty and the handwritten sign promising, “Ich bin gleich wieder für Sie da,” was not convincing. Peering in I had the impression he maybe hadn’t been “there for us” in a century or more. The woman glanced up at the staircase leading into the house she as visiting. She glanced at us. “Sind Sie noch ein Paar Minuten da?”

    The child was sleeping and the stairs were steep: she clearly didn’t want to have to rouse him carry him, lock everything. Oh, yes, I said: we are waiting for the camera guy, we’ll be here a few more minutes, “wir passen auf Ihr Kind auf.” We will look after your child. Oh, thank you, she said, and bounded up the stairs – actually bounded – without so much as locking her bike.

    Is it Berliners who are so fit, or just Germans?

    The camera guy came strolling magnificently down the street carrying a little notepad. His belly was broad and his gait wide and easy. “That’s him,” said my partner, “it’s got to be.” And we were right – the guy pulled up outside the shop window and gazed at the small group which had gathered. “Ein richtiges Kamera-Party,” I said, we’re just having a bit of a camera party. He laughed, the sun is finally out and everybody is happy. The shop is called Camera Ambulance. Just as he was unlocking the door the grandmother came leaping down the stairs to collect her child. “Danke,” she said, and I told her cheerfully, “Der wollte nach München, um seine eigene Karriere zu folgen – ich habe ihn überredet.” He was keen to set off for Munich in pursuit of his own career – but I talked him out of it. “Ah! that’s a relief, many thanks,” she said, giving her fresh beautiful smile. On the cycle ride home we followed a woman with such a gloriously high round arse that as she was pedalling I turned to point her out to him, and he was on the verge of pointing her out to me. Berlin is filled with beauty. And babies. Perhaps it is not so much an attack of baby fever as the fact that all the babies who exist hereabouts already have now woken from their long sweet winter sleeps and taken to the streets, they are strolling in carriages, towed by their parents’ bikes, sitting nodding in half dozens in the large buckets on wheels by which local kindergartens transport their charges. If you gaze in at the window of a Kinderladen (a local ‘children shop’) you will see sweet little low tables with tiny chairs set with plates and sturdy cups, at which the Kinderladen staff crouch down to sit at child level, while everyone is served a proper hot lunch.

  • new under the sun

    Walking through the park in the unexpected sunshine yesterday I realised suddenly: strolling through summer in Berlin is like strolling through an off-duty circus. People are riding bicycles with no hands, they are taking turns practising walking slack rope, one man is playing the tuba and another is set up with his slap box between his knees. Two Turkish drug dealers have set up an adorable ‘office’ with a plastic chair, an empty red milk crate on its side standing by the path, and a dull red singlet bag bin hanging from a handy branch. It is so patently an office and the office Open that we both start to laugh. On the rolls of concrete piping downhill people are teaching their dogs new tricks. It’s too cold for barefoot.

    I was writing in a cafe this morning when a joyous gurgle caught my ear and I glanced up. Two men, both burly, both bearded, both wearing baseball caps, were standing one at either end of the long counter laden with cakes, each of them holding up an infant. It was comical to see them so strongly mirroring each other, in their outfits, in their body types, and seemingly unconscious of it. As I watched, the one on the left, who was ordering, held up his baby and made it wave to the other baby at the other end of the counter, waiting. The babies gazed at one another and gurgled. Behind the counter the staff were laughing. This was our third sunny day since October. It’s easy to laugh when the sun is out.

    I was so immersed later that when after a long while my second coffee hadn’t arrived I had to ask myself, did I actually order that? Or did I… just dream it? The recollection had sunk like in water, leaving absolutely no trace. I went on writing. A shadow fell over my page. I could feel all my concentration tightening til he was gone. This is the man, one of two men who come in, visits every week two or three times collecting donations for his wellbeing. This one sells Motz, a street mag for homeless people’s income, and the other sells little slips of paper on which he has written Inspirational Poems of his own. To be interrupted when pen is moving across paper and I have the next five sentences stacked precariously in order on the prong of my thought as I shovel forward diligently – it upsets everything and then all the sparkling world is gone. I have been this way since childhood and no matter how I tried to unlearn it – my mother would say, why can’t you just answer the phone and then go back to your writing? – I can’t. So I was relieved when the guy, to whom I have explained two or three times this need, moved away. But he struck at my heart all the same. He is so unpretending, so humble, so courteous. The next two tables engaged with him but no one would give him any money. This is a hipster cafe, which I choose for its Australian staff and because they play the languid tunes by which concentration is most possible. I am there for hours each week. I thought about how it would feel to come in out of the sunshine on this glorious day, everyone littering the pavement with their expensive prams and their lovely bicycles, and to ask round a place in which people in their new clothes, and Cathoel, are feasting on ten-dollar breakfasts, and to be told: no, I’ve nothing for you, I can’t help you.

    I could, but I won’t.

    It would feel excluding, is how it would feel. And yet he thanked each table of twenty-five-year-olds calmly, wishing each in turn “Schönen Tag noch,” a beautiful rest of the day. At the doorway I caught up with him, where he had paused to talk with the German girl sitting in the window. She was reaching for her purse so I waited out of range, not wanting her to think, oh – that other woman is giving something, I needn’t give him then as much. I put my finger on his sleeve. “Ich wollte Ihnen herzlich danken, dass Sie mich nicht unterbrochen haben. Das ist wirklich lieb von Ihnen.” I wanted to thank you from the heart (Germans say), that you didn’t interrupt me. That was really lovely of you. His face broke into a wizened smile, though he is young. He put a hand on his own heart. “I recognised you – and that you have told me you are working -” I said, “I so appreciate it. You know if the concentration gets shattered, then everything is gone.” He said something I couldn’t understand, maybe that he does know this, he writes, also. Ah, I said: then you know! And we regarded each other with a terrific fleeting fondness. This is possible in Berlin, I find more of it here than I have found anywhere, even on the terrible subways of New York. I gave him some money, not much, about the price of a coffee, and was aware of the self-serving hope that he would take this as confirmation of our agreement rather than incentive to interrupt me the next time. The guy with the poetry is harder to deal with, with his lambent eyes. I cannot bear to be interrupted to read his verses whilst struggling to write poetry of my own.

    I told my companion about this experience, he knows the guys I’m speaking of, and we turned out of the park at the end and came into a thicket of streets which led loopingly round to the big second hand emporium with its American flag changing room curtain. A cardboard cutout stands sentinel in the booth, Second Handy Warhol. It is a relief to need cooler clothes at last. I bought a stiff denim dress which feels like you’re wearing a little sailboat, it stands out like canvas in a gormless triangle and I feel about five years old standing in my bare arms and legs which have been covered since Autumn, I will need to wear several layers underneath this frock until probably June but it yields the promise of Summer to come and the long glorious evenings, the bald European sky.

  • spring peaces

    The hottest bath imaginable. Coconut oiled my hair. Wrapped head to hip in towels. New book and early to bed, ahhh thank you blissful alone time. I can hear people on the street outside cobbling and shouting, gearing up for their Friday night, and it just seems to drift by like leaves on the wind.

    I have to hand an Abdullah Ibrahim album which just never tires. Here come the well-placed stepping stones down into the deeper river, where he seems to pick up both of his hands together as though they were horses’ reins and we are ready to go down together, ready to immerse. I am thinking of that Ted Hughes poem that moves me so dearly, Wodwo. “What am I?.. very strange but I’ll/go on looking.” The sparkling splashes thrown up by the pianist like clots of gleaming mud from effortlessly racing hooves reach me from the next room. I love these high ceilings. I love the sense of resting and nestling in a little, after all the long line of moves from apartment to apartment and from town to town. It’s good to stay home on the lean-in to the weekend and to have no one waiting for me, no one who expects anything. It feels rare. It feels like music resting on my skin.

    I just downloaded my photographs from the week and was glad to see they begin with a walk in the slightly greening forest over Easter, there is colour in the pictures now, life revives and the dank sour world underground can be escaped, at last, the old winter closes. In the sunshine today I walked all the way up to the junction to pay my rent and stood in line with all the Germans who were sorting out their Friday afternoon banking. Courteously we turned to one another to indicate when a machine fell free. I love participating in these almost sensual German community signals, by which everyone lovingly tends one another. In the vestibule which separates the cold air without from the heated air within a woman sat with her colourful cup, a ruined junkie’s face, on a tiny square of cardboard she has folded. Outside, another addict held the door back, broadly, smilingly, for everyone who enters and then offers up his greasy paper cup with its few coins. I walked home slowly in the last of the sunshine, our second sunny day since perhaps October, it has been delicious and chill and fresh. I lack the local knowledge to dress for the right weather so when the sun comes out I’m always caught out too cold, it’d just hard for me to picture it can be so sunny and still so frigid. My hands turned hard on the handlebars this morning and I pedalled harder, past all the drug dealers lining the entrances to the park, past the leafless trees, past the falafel stand the size of an ice cream cart, past the bins. In the afternoon I did the banking and then when all my errands were done and I was walking home I bought a plant, a long, trailing gout of ivy in a hanging basket, and carried it home through everyone’s smiles at the sunshine and at each other and at this greenery, this grasping for greenery we all have here just now. The man in the plant shop introduced himself when I was leaving. His name is Kadir. He is Turkish and lived most of his life on Cyprus, where he had another plant shop; he says he has only been in Berlin for a month. He handed me a flower, a purple short stemmed tulip, and I tucked it into the mop of my overgrown basket having chosen the most outrageously florid ivy specimen from the back of his uppermost shelf.

    The flower was in recognition I think of where our conversation began, which was when I was fingering the piney-scented sage pots and he came outside to find out what was happening on the noisy roadside outside his shop. A commotion had occurred. I don’t think I caused it but I did make it worse and now I was standing with my back to the road, burying my fingers in the lambs’ ear softness of the leaves and my heart pounding, hoping I was not about to get set upon. Over my shoulder I saw the car drive away, having idled a long, threatening minute, and then the man Kadir from the shop came out and we began to talk normally. What happened was that as I stopped for the plants, the pots of flowers, the buckets of lilies, a woman gorgeous with long straight black hair swinging pushed aside the man she was with, saying something in Turkish which could have been playful or not playful. It was hard to tell. I watched covertly. He shoved her. He took hold of her ungently. He pushed her down into the car and went round the driver’s side to get in.

    Across the screen of the greenery I shouted. “Hey! Hey.” I made my voice dark and authoritative: people can see you, people see. He glanced at me, hesitated only a moment, went back round to the kerb side of the vehicle and opened up her door, and bending to the level of her face he inserted his head into the car and roared something right at her. Slammed the door shut on her then went round and got in and revved the engine. I put the plant down and scuttled. Was frightened. Wasn’t sure what to do. Was frightened for her. I tapped with my knuckles on her window. She turned a startled face, shrinking, crying out in fear. Oh, my god, woman, do not let this fear take up its residence in your sunny female heart. He leaned across her and opened the window. I said – something. “Misbrauchen Sie sie nicht!”, don’t mistreat her, something far too formal and grammatically scrambled. Reaching across her the man shoved the passenger door open on me sharply, trying to push me off balance. I skipped out of his reach, wondering: now, would he get out. There were people everywhere. Or would he – yes, he just turned back to her and they turned to each other and I could hear her plaintive reasoning tones as I walked away across the only very shallow pavement and buried my attention in the sage for dear life, holding the soft furry leaf wrapped tightly round my index finger, waiting for him to go away, waiting for them all to just go away.

  • god bless the adult

    I met a man with shit-stained pants on the subway and we sang together. He had been swaying by his pile of plastic bags for half an hour, offering speeches to the cabin. People ignored him and looked away. Only the Hispanic man behind us covered his face with split fingers and laughed into his hand. When at last a voice spoke, mysteriously, smoothly, over some unseen PA – good afternoon folks, sorry to disturb, I am going to be making a little music for you this evening – it startled us, mildly, and the shit-stained man looked over, eagerly, and we all saw a younger man, also black, beautifully groomed with a high-maintenance beard, bending to the floor to switch on his little blaster which filled the train with some R & B groove.

    He began to sing, effortlessly, like a bird on a branch who is free. He sang about Her, She’s gonna leave me, I know it, I know my heart is hers. Bending to the instrument again he chose a Michael Jackson groove, Rock with You, with that lovely tripping flute that everybody recognises instantly.

    Oh, Michael Jackson. We love you and we were happy to be transported by your music. Your music and the MTA. The shit-stained man left his pole and his pile of bags and ventured up into the cabin, dancing, smoothing his shoulders across the air. He tapped the singer on the shoulder and passed him some coin, “his last dollar” said my friend. Then he instantly, uncrazily, turned away and sashayed back to his post, his literal post, making no demands on the singer and not importuning. The man singing was emboldened to dance around a little. “He’s good,” said the fellow next to me, and I said, “He is! And he’s dancing like that while the train is crazy swaying.” I got up, grabbing a pole, and swung my hips a little, in joy with the music. When the singer came past collecting “anything you have helps, and if you don’t have, I love a smile,” we all dug eagerly into our pockets, you have gave us joy.

    The shit-stained man hollered, “Baby! You’re great! You need to get yourself in the studio!” The singer answered, ruefully, “Man. I am in the studio.” “You need an agent.” The man behind me was laughing anew. Tears fell in splinters from behind his outstretched fingers, he gripped his face and wept with the mercy of it. “Oh yes!” he was saying, helplessly, to himself: “He needs you to be his agent, baby!” New Yorkers are aware, I think, of one another’s ludicrises.

    The singer returned to his portable blaster, the subway doors still open, and he picked it up and called out thank you and left I thought how he could lose all his profit if someone grabbed the music box and ran away with it. The doors slid shut and we began to move. Left alone to his audience the man in stained pants began to declaim in song. He sang, movingly, God Bless the Child, in a cadence and tune of his own. I joined in, a lovely melody we wove and we were glancing at each other, shyly. I said, “You have a lovely voice.” He said, “I’m 71 years old. I begin to sometimes wonder, what is God’s plan for me.” “Ah,” I said: “that I don’t know.” He said, “My mother always told me when I was little. Boy, God has a special plan in mind for you. But I begin to wonder sometimes, what it is.”

    He collected all the crumpled bags at his feet, laboriously, very often missing when he went to grab them by their outstretched necks. At the next station he was gone and another busker came on, young, Mexican, radiant, and silent, a stocky boy wearing a sandwich board with his two stumps of arms held out in front of him, like Jesus on a candle. His sign read, Hi, my name is Felix. I lost both arms in a work accident. God bless you and thank you for any help you can give. The cabin fell silent. All the joy fell away. We are lost in an industrial accident, this fractured world. Soberly people fished in their pockets, to help. Felix’s face was suffused with the grace of joyous living. He came past and I fished shame-faced in my emptied-out purse. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.” “Thank you.” His voice was soft and filled with humour. “I just gave all my money to the busker,” I said, uselessly. He smiled at me, and I smiled at him a smile that turned down at the corners and pressed my hand to my heart where it ached, and at the next station he got off and walked away, inside his sandwich board, a human pyramid only one head high. As I watched him disappearing into the mystery of his own devilishly difficult life and its challenges, his form flickered with metal stripes as the train took off, I realised my hand was still pressed to where my heart lives and that, unlike the man in stains, this younger man trapped in his sandwich board “for life, as it were,” as Washington Square has it, has made, is making decisions; he has formulated a plan; he is not waiting for some unseen God to evidence in his life. God, if you’re there, bless the child that gets his own. Make us less helpless (we say, helplessly). Give us this day each the daily breadth to see where we are in this life, where we can get to in this world, and how we can all help each other. Amen.